ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to show how employees of major US companies, a group of agents among the most affected by financial expansion, have been led towards becoming involved in the financial playing field and, eventually, to contributing towards the destabilisation of their own employment standards, under the continuous monitoring of their employers. Their widespread access to company pension funds, created by employers under union pressure following the Second World War and, at the time, considered to be a major fringe benefit, backfired on them from the 1980s onwards. The funds at that time served to lead hostile takeover bids which 'restructured' industrial firms, implemented massive redundancies and opened the way for the de-industrialisation of North America. The chapter illustrates the degree to which finance's expansion originated, not from an endogenous socio-economic dynamic, but rather from a redistribution of economic powers that takes place through interactions with other types of actors, such as unions and employers, and judges and academics.
